I’m working on a website usability project for a charity that provides services to anyone affected by dementia. This project will help to ensure that we are delivering support and information services in the best possible way.

We will need an hour of your time on Monday 23 November in Central London. There will be other studies conducted throughout 2010, so please let us know if you’re interested but not available on this date.

If you’d like to participate or to find out more, please complete this form and we will contact you with more information. London travel expenses will be reimbursed.

If you know someone who might be interested in participating, please pass them this information.

Thanks very much for your help with this.

Are you currently looking at purchasing a new mobile phone, switching your insurance provider or getting breakdown cover for your car?

We’re looking for people who are not so technically savvy who might be available to help us with a small research project in London on 6-7 July. We’re after everyone from students to grandparents, so if this is not you, perhaps it would suit someone you know – feel free to pass this onto them!

You’ll get £40 for an hour of your time, we’ll come and meet you at a location that is mutually convenient (in and around Central London), and it is really very easy – we’re interested in your experience and feedback, that’s all! Actually most people find these sessions pretty fun!

Over the past week or so Mark and I have been working out the details that go on the panels of the Audience Matrix  that we shared with you last week (or dress-up-doll document as it has otherwise been named).  We’ve made a few changes and added a bunch of definitions.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

ROLES:

• Content Creator: a user who primarily creates, reviews, and edits content for a site. Key tasks: Add  content, edit content, find existing content, view list of content creation/revision tasks.
• Site Editor: a user who has authority to approve, edit or reject content and who may be able to manage some editorial workflow and user permissions. Key tasks: Add  content, edit content, find existing content, view list of content creation/revision tasks, review content, reject/feedback on content to original author, schedule content,
• Site Admin: manage user permissions, manage site structure, adding new content types, create and review reports and manage some site settings (RSS Publishing, IP Address Blocking). Key tasks: Manage user permissions, Add / Edit / Delete Content Types, Manage Information Architecture (site sections, sub-sections, taxonomy (as in, vocabulary), Create a report, Review a report.
• Site Builder: creates site from scratch by choosing, writing, customising modules and/or themes, manages setup and maintenance. Is a developer (for the purposes of audience definition, themers are considered developers). Key Tasks: Develop site functionality, implement site design.

question: who can/should be able to create new content types? who can create new site sections and subsections (vocabulary and/or terms)   etc.

TYPE OF SITE:

• Brochureware Site: hierarchical structure of relatively static content, often includes forms (eg. contact/feedback), may be multi-author
• Blog: sequence of chronological posts that may be assigned to categories, may also include ‘fixed’ pages, often includes comments, trackbacks, RSS feed, most often single author
• News: a categorical/hierarchical grouping of content usually ordered chronologically but often ‘curated’ by an editorial team, may also include  comments, trackbacks, RSS feed, often multi-author, often requires multiple templates
• Events: a combination of content supporting an event, including content about the event, a schedule/calendar of events, list of participants,  online registration, may also require online submissions, social networking functionality, news, email update list
• Social Site: comprises member profiles and communication between those member in the form of discussion forums, wikis, events, blogs, require member signup, subscription, RSS,

NO. OF USERS

• 1 : no permissions, no workflow, that user does everything (one stop shop) BUT most like to have simple requirements (how manage giving access to all functionality when the mostly won’t need it). Likely to generate small amounts of content.
• 2-5 : multiple authors, may require permissions, may require workflow (simple approval process), may require separation between content management tasks and site management tasks but usually not overly complicated requirements.
• 6-15: multiple authors and editors, likely to require permissions, likely to require workflow, likely to require separation between content management tasks and site management tasks may have some complex requirements, will have significant amount of content generated.
• 15+ : requires permission management (several permission profiles), probably requires workflow (content review/approval), likely to generate a lot of content to be managed and require content scheduling – it’s a complicated machine and it needs a whole section around managing the machine, let alone making the content to feed the machine. Involves a lot of content and likely complex taxonomy.

question: should it matter how much ‘experience’ you have with Drupal? Should we add another row for this? (Insider/Midsider/Outsider) – we can’t decide. One one level it seems like it does matter, but we also think that it shouldn’t matter… would adding this add unnecessary complexity? (For the time being we’re leaving this out).

PLAY ALONG AT HOME!

This is going to be a pretty instrumental tool for us on this project and we’ll be referring to it regularly. If you’re interested in checking it out in more detail or if you’d like to get more involved in this project, the perhaps you’d like your very own copy. Yes? Well, you’re in luck because you can now download a copy here: Audience Matrix PDF

HOW TO USE THE MATRIX:

Over the coming weeks we’re going to be inviting you to submit your ideas for revisions to the Drupal7 Admin interface and overall user experience. It will be very helpful for us all to use this document to help make sure that we’re designing for the 80% and not necessarily just for ourselves! And it is also a really great way to expose missing elements and possible flaws in our concepts. Using the document to test the example we show in the video above helped us to realise that we needed things like a close button on the dashboard (I know, d’uh!), a place to hold the user generated content from things like comment as well as contact forms, and got us thinking about a whole host of thorny permissions and workflow issues. (Don’t get me started!)

This is, however, a living document – we welcome your feedback and questions on the changes we’ve made and how we’re using it – so, please – let us have it!  (but don’t pay too much heed to the concept we’ve presented as an example in the video, it is very early days and it’s just one of many ideas we’re working on.)

You might remember we mentioned that we were going to kick off an activity we call ‘Pimp Your Admin’ at the recent Drupalcon conference – we have a few interesting screencasts already and now we’d like to invite you to join in!

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can bend it to your will – get it to do just about anything you need it to do. Same goes for it’s administration interface (admin).

Before we get to work on the Drupal7 Admin, we’d love to see what you out there have done to make the Drupal Admin System do what you need it to do, or just to work better for you and your project.

Here’s how we want to do it – simply take a little screencast, it seems to take us about six or seven minutes – and walk us through your admin system and show us what you’ve done, even if it’s just something tiny – to make Drupal work better for you.

You can check out some examples that others have done at the Drupal7UX YouTube Group then once you’ve recorded yours, upload it and post it to the group so we can take a look. (Of course, if you’d rather host it elsewhere, you can just leave a link to your preferred location in the comments below (thanks Brandonian, we’ve got a note of yours!)

We’re really looking forward to seeing your work and to see if some interesting trends start to emerge!

update: for those who ask, we’ve been using Silverback to record our screencasts. If you’re a Mac user and interested in User Experience you should have Silverback. It’s great and ridiculously affordable.